The IndictBushNow movement would like to invite you to join a campaign to oppose domestic spying, mass surveillance and data collection on the people of the United States.

Bush and Cheney’s secret spying program broke the law. This has been admitted and some of those programs were suspended. This new national campaign insists that the data that was collected on millions of people through these illegal spying operations should not be retained by the government.

This new nation-wide effort is called Expose & Expunge. It was initiated by the public interest legal organization, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

The national Expose and Expunge campaign has launched a sign-on letter that all can participate in. The initial signers, including former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, have come together to take a stand against these continuing violations of fundamental rights. The initial signers represent a broad and diverse cross-section of leaders, human rights advocates, attorneys and legal scholars (see the initial list of signers).

Please join this urgently needed campaign, sign the letter, and forward it widely to friends and family members. If we all work together we can succeed in defending and advancing our basic rights.

We the undersigned call on the Obama Administration and Congress to immediately begin identifying and expunging from all government databases the massive accumulation of information collected by the Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying operations on millions of people who broke no law.

Some of these illegal spying programs were suspended and yet the government maintains the illegally collected data. These databases should be expunged.

We also oppose the continuation of other programs initiated during the Bush era which continue on in wholesale data collection and mass surveillance, unchecked and unabated. For instance, federal agents, local law enforcement and U.S. military personnel, with input from private right-wing political groups, continue to collect and report surveillance data, including fabricated disinformation, to the 72 government Fusion Centers around the United States. Fusion Centers have been found to target political, student, and religious organizations and activities.

The people of the United States have a legal right to be free from government surveillance, the type of which was initiated by the Bush administration on an enormous scale. Using the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext, the Bush White House permitted the FBI, the National Security Agency, the CIA, Pentagon and other law-enforcement and military agencies to conduct unprecedented data collection against the people.

Thousands have been targeted because of their political beliefs and activities, their religious beliefs, their race and ethnicity, or because they inadvertently fell into one of the many broad categories to justify and execute the sweeping data collection programs. This is the modern-day variant of the discredited witch-hunts of the 1950s.

We call on the Obama Administration and Congress to order a complete audit of law-enforcement and military data and record-keeping systems and to disclose to the public the scope and parameters of data-collection on people and organizations in the United States.

The people’s rights protected under the Constitution are fundamentally diminished unless these illegal operations are halted and the rights of all people are restored by the identification of data collection programs, and the expunging of those databases.